Ideas

by Peter Watson

  General literacy began in India about the time that Panini compiled his Grammar. After this, for about two hundred years, most written Sanskrit texts were religious, but secular poetry, drama, scientific, technical and philosophical texts began around the second century BC. At that stage, all men of letters had to know the Astadhyayi by heart. This was a prolonged process but it showed they were educated.19 As time passed, the rules Panini had set out were enforced more strictly–this was in an attempt to keep the language of learning and of sacred subjects pure. As sometimes happens, this strictness encouraged rather than hindered creativity, helping to stimulate the golden age of Sanskrit literature, which flourished in India between AD 500 and 1200, beginning with the most famous name of all, Kalidasa. It is important to add that the classical tradition in India is in essence secular. Religious scripture (agama) and scholarly writing (sastra) are usually distinguished from ‘literature’ (kavya).20

  Kalidasa’s origins are no more certain than Panini’s. His name means ‘slave of the goddess Kali’, which to some has suggested a birth in southern India, though Kali, a consort of Shiva, had a strong following in what became Bengal. At the same time, certain features of Kalidasa’s writing hint that he was a Brahman from Ujjain or Mandasor (many details betray a close acquaintance with the fertile Narmada valley, in the region of Malwa). As with the plays of Sophocles, seven of Kalidasa’s Sanskrit classics have survived. First and foremost, he was a lyric poet, but he composed epics and dramas as well. His most familiar work is the poem Meghaduta, ‘Cloud Messenger’, in which a lover attempts to send his beloved a message by means of a passing cloud at the beginning of the rains. During the course of this narrative, the cloud passes from the Vindhyas, the holy mountain range north of the Deccan plateau, to the Himalayas, floating above a landscape that changes and brings out the cloud’s feelings–beautiful rivers, impressive mountains, elaborate palaces. But Kalidasa’s most evocative drama is Shakuntala, about King Dushyanta, who comes across a beautiful nymph one day while he is out hunting. So captivated is he that he deserts his wife and court and consummates a union with the bewitching nymph. Eventually he returns to his court and in time forgets her. Later, when the king’s son by Shakuntala appears in the capital, he at first refuses to recognise the boy. What stands out in this story, which is, after all, a simple plot, is the deceptive reality of Kalidasa’s dialogue, the mutable humanity of his characters, the way he finds beauty everywhere. It was in particular Kalidasa’s understanding and depiction of character, the way it can grow and develop–or deteriorate–that prefigured Shakespeare.21

  The Guptas had their own theory about drama, described by Bhamaha (fifth century?), the earliest literary critic/theoretican there is evidence for, though he was adapting a much older tradition, the Natyasastra of ‘Bharata’ (the mythical first ‘actor’). According to the Natyasastra, drama was invented to describe the conflicts that arose after the world declined from the golden age of harmony.22 The main idea in the Natyasastra was that there are ten types of play–street plays, archaic plays about the gods, ballets, etc.–which explore the eight important emotions: love, humour, energy, anger, fear, grief, disgust and astonishment. It was the purpose of the drama, on this reading, to imitate the main events of the world and to give the audience various types of aesthetic appreciation (it was not the dramatist’s aim simply to induce the audience to identify with the characters). The drama ‘should show the audience what it meant to be sensitive, comic, heroic, furious, apprehensive, compassionate, horrified, marvellous’. Drama was to be enjoyable but the theatre should be instructive too. Bhamaha extended this analysis to literature as a whole.

  The advanced brilliance of Indian literature at this time is reinforced by the fact that its ideas and practices spread throughout south-east Asia. Gupta-style Buddhas are found in Malaya, Java and Borneo.23 Sanskrit inscriptions, which are first seen in Indo-China in the third and fourth centuries, are thought to indicate the beginnings of literacy there, ‘nearly all the pre-Islamic scripts of south-east Asia being derivatives of Gupta Brahmin’.24

  It was under Gupta rule that the Hindu temple emerged as India’s classical architectural form. It is difficult to overestimate the importance of the Hindu temple. The world owes a great debt to Indian art, especially in China, Korea, Tibet, Cambodia and Japan, but in the West too. Philip Rawson, of the Gulbenkian Museum of Oriental Art at the University of Durham in the United Kingdom, describes it this way: ‘Certain symbols and images which appear in later historical art first showed themselves in the miniature sculptures, in the seals and the sealings of the Indus Valley. Examples are the ithyphallic deity seated with knees akimbo as “lord of the beasts”, the naked girl, the dancing figure with one leg lifted diagonally across the other, the sacred bull, the stout masculine torso, the “tree of life”, and innumerable modest types of monkeys, females, cattle, and carts modelled in terracotta.’25

  Historically, Hinduism did not stipulate any permanent structure for its rituals. Hindus were free to make offerings anywhere in the countryside where the gods chose to reveal their presence.26 During the second century AD, however, Hinduism started to reflect an alliance with the Indian theory of kingship, under which individual deities were adored by kings in order that they might associate themselves with the god’s supernatural power. As a result, the evolution of Hindu stone architecture and temple carving took place at scattered–but highly elaborate–single sites which were for a time the capital cities of dynasties. The Brahmans used these sites in their sacred texts–the Puranas–to create legends which attracted pilgrims, many of whom built other temples. In this way temple complexes became a feature of Indian religious/architectural life.

  As was true in classical Greece, the Hindu temple was understood as the home of a deity, with an icon inside, where people could offer gifts and pray. Every building was dedicated to a specific god–often some manifestation of Vishnu, Shiva and so on. (As in epics, the major gods tended to be accretions, of other cults, local deities, nature-spirits etc.) The design of the early temples was divided into three. On the outside was a porch, often decorated in sculpted reliefs showing the deity in various mythological scenes. Inside was a large, square hall, the ambulatory or mandapa, where the faithful could assemble and, sometimes, dance. This led to the third area, the sanctuary (the shrine-room, garbhagriha, means ‘womb-house’). The temples were usually built of stone blocks, fitted together without mortar, and the entire complex was raised on a paved rectangle, intended to represent the cosmos in miniature, thus making the temple analogous to heaven. From such simple beginnings, the temples grew into flamboyantly ornate structures, some into entire cities. Many temples were later surrounded by concentric rings of enclosures with huge gates, and each was conceived as ‘an axis of the world’, symbolically representing the mythical Mount Meru, the central feature in the Hindu sacred cosmology.27 Associated with the temple complexes were architectural schools.

  The iconography of Indian temples obviously stems from different assumptions from Christian art, but it is no less closely conceived and no less interlocking. In general Hindu images are far more archaic than Christian ones, and in many cases older even than Greek art. The myths of the great gods–Vishnu and Shiva–which feature in the carvings, are repeated every kalpa–i.e., every four billion, three hundred and twenty million years. All the gods are customarily accompanied by or associated with vehicles–Vishnu by a cosmic serpent or snake (symbol of the primaeval waters of creation), Brahma by a gander, Indra by an elephant, Shiva by a bull. The gander was chosen, for example, because it exemplifies the two-fold nature of all beings: it swims on the surface of the water but is not bound to it.28 The breathing noise of the gander is what the practitioners of yoga seek to attain–in fact, the rhythm of yogic breathing is known as ‘the inner gander’.29 The elephant, which traditionally supports Indra, is called Airavata, the celestial ancestor of all elephants and symbol of the rain-bestowing monsoon-cloud.30 Because elephants ar
e the vehicle of Indra, king of the gods, elephants belong to kings.31

  The basic and most common object in Shiva shrines is the lingam or phallus, a form of the god that goes all the way back to stone worship in the Neolithic period (see above, Chapter 3). There are elaborate myths in Hindu legend about the origins of the great lingam, which rises up from the ocean and then bursts open, to reveal Shiva inside. This is faintly reminiscent of the Aphrodite legend in Greek myths.

  One of the most familiar figures from Indian art is that of Shiva represented as a dancing god, Nataraja, with four arms, surrounded by a ring of fire. This is a good example of the way Indian iconography works. Shiva, the divine dancer, lives on Mount Kailasa with his beautiful wife Parvati, his two sons, and his bull, Nandi. This is a form of family life, worshipped through the lingam. As the divine dancer, Shiva’s steps will both dance the universe out of existence and create a new one.32 (Dance in Indian tradition is an ancient form of magic, which can induce trance. But it is also an act of creation that can ‘summons’ the dancer to a higher personality.33) The upper right hand of Nataraja usually carries a drum, for the beating of rhythm. This evokes sound, the vehicle of speech, through which revelation will be obtained. Sound in India is associated with ether, the first of the five elements, out of which the others arise. The upper left hand holds a tongue of flame, the element of destruction and a warning of what is to come. The second right hand displays a ‘fear not’ gesture, while the second left hand points down to the foot that is raised, symbolising release from the earth and, therefore, salvation. The entire figure is dancing on a demon, not merely to show victory, but to show man’s ignorance, because the attainment of true wisdom stems from the conquest of the demon. The ring of flames is not only fire but light, symbolising the potentially destructive forces abroad on earth but also the light of truth. This does not in any way complete the many meanings of this figure (the actual pose, for example, symbolises the ‘whirligig of time’), but it conveys the interlocking nature of Indian iconography without which the temples of India cannot be understood.

  A few dozen temples from the Gupta era survive, at Sanchi, Nalanda, Buddh Gaya and other sites in Madhya Pradesh, Uttar Pradesh and Bihar. But it is at Aihole and Badami, 200 miles south-east of modern Mumbai, that a ‘feast of architecture and sculpture’ marks the real arrival of the new form. At Aihole, the seventy or so temples are embellished with inscriptions of the poetry of Ravikirti, in one of which there is the first dated reference to Kalidasa. These were followed by the great stone-cut temples at the Pallavas’ main port, Mamallapuram, half-way down the eastern coast (the Pallavas were a later dynasty–we are now in the late seventh/beginning of the eighth century). Carved out of granite hillocks, the ‘seven pagodas’ of Mamallapuram are among the finest examples of south Indian sculpture-cum-architecture. Much of the art of Cambodia and Java, including Angkor and Borobudur, was Hindu-Buddhist.34

  A slightly later dynasty, the Rashtrakutas, patronised the site at Ellora (220 miles northwest of Mumbai). Here there is an exposed rock face two kilometres from end to end which had for long been dotted with cave temples. Out of this rock face, Krishna I, the Rashtrakuta king, began to carve what became without question the most impressive rock-cut monument anywhere in the world. Kailasa, so-called, was carved out of the rock until it was an entirely free-standing excavation, a temple the size of a cathedral, containing individual cells for monks, staircases, shrines, precincts and gateways all cut from the raw rock. As John Keay rightly says, this may appear to be architecture, but it is in fact sculpture. Local inscriptions hint that even the gods were impressed and the sculptor himself was emboldened to remark ‘Oh, how was it that I created this?’ The sculpture/temple also throws light on the motivation of the Rashtrakutas. Mount Kailasa, in the Himalayas, is considered to be the earthly abode of Lord Shiva. In being hewn from the living rock, the Kailasa temple at Ellora was intended to reposition the holy mountain within Rashtrakuta territory, to bring the sacred geography of India inside their province.35

  The subcontinent’s largest concentration of temples, however, occupies Bhuvaneshwar, the capital of Orissa. Orissa and Khajuraho never fully succumbed to Islam, and at the latter site, twenty-five temples remain out of eighty, grouped around a lake.36 Some have dance rooms separate from the main temple, and all have elaborate figure sculpture cut in deep relief, many in erotic postures and all profoundly sensual. It is important to say that, iconographically, the erotic carvings are intended to represent the delights awarded by celestial girls–called apsaras–after this life (though this is a big subject, very controversial, with much scholarship attached). Many critics regard these figures as the finest achievement of Indian art. In addition to the elaborate sculptures, the temples were covered in paintings, wall hangings and encrusted with jewels, most of which have been looted.

  The temples at Orissa are probably the most impressive of all: they comprise two hundred but were once many more. The earliest were built in the seventh century, the latest in the thirteenth. Densely packed, vaguely egg-shaped, with large vertical flutes and many horizontal vanes, the concentration of buildings is intended to overwhelm the spectator, and the very idea of the complex may have been a response to the Islamic invasion of India. These complexes appear to have been spared by the invading Muslims only because they were so remote, and so soon abandoned to the jungle. They were rediscovered in the nineteenth century by a certain Captain Burt, who ‘found the site choked with trees and its elaborate system of lakes and watercourses overgrown and already beyond reclaim. Like Cambodia’s slightly later Angkor Wat when it was “discovered” by a wide-eyed French expedition, the place had been deserted for centuries and the sacred symbolism of its elaborate topography greedily obliterated by jungle.’37 Since then, analysis of the inscriptions has resurrected some Chandela history, and exploration of the iconography has shown how important the sites were for Shiva worship.

  For many people, the most impressive as well as the most beautiful single temple in all India is that built at Tanjore by the Chola kings in the early eleventh century. The Cholas were a Dravidian (south Indian) people who had occupied the Kaveri delta since prehistoric times. Kaveri underwent a revival beginning in 985 with King Rajaraja I, who decided, towards the end of his reign, to memorialise his achievements by building a temple in Tanjore. Erected over about fifteen years, it may well be the tallest temple in India, nearly 200 feet high and crowned by an eighty-ton domed capstone.38 It bears an important inscription and is decorated with rare Chola paintings, showing Shiva mythology and celestial female dancers. There is a huge lingam in the main shrine, showing that Tanjore is dedicated to Shiva. The temple was the centre of a huge complex, with perhaps five hundred Brahmans and the same number of musicians and dancing girls taking part in the ceremonies. For hundreds of miles around, people donated money and land to the temple, as did villages, offering tithes.39 The Chola produced famous bronzes, many of the kind considered above, with Shiva as Nataraja, Lord of the Dance, surrounded by a circle of flame.

  The Hindu temples of India are one of those self-evident glories that have never broken through in the West as artistic and intellectual equivalents of, say, classical Greek architecture. Yet they are easily on a par with the Hellenic achievements, being, like them, as much sculptural as architectural in conception.40 The main thing to grasp is that both temples and sculpture reflect a set of ideal canons of form. The assumptions underlying these canons are not Western but they follow sacred principles and proportions which were handed down from generation to generation. On top of this, Western notions of ‘classicism’ do not incorporate the sensual, erotic exuberance that is such a central ingredient of Indian classicism. But we should never forget that this sensual nature of Indian art is not worldly. It is meant to remind the faithful of what awaits them in heaven, of the inadequacy of beauty here on earth, and the inconstancy of earthly pleasures. In a sense, this is what Plato was driving at–nevertheless, Indian art and archite
cture challenge the very idea of what classicism is.

  The success of the Guptas was not confined to India. Embarking from the port of Tamralipti in Bengal (then called Vanga), Indian ships exported in the main pepper but also cotton, ivory, brassware, monkeys and elephants as far as China, bringing back silk, musk and amber. (Neither tea nor opium were yet traded.) But India, which had already exported Buddhism, now exported Hinduism and Sanskritic culture. The Hindu kingdom of Funan, now Vietnam, was ruled by the Brahman Kaundinya, and Bali, parts of Sumatra and Java also became ‘islands of Hindu’. It is likely that literacy reached these parts of the world with the arrival of Sanskrit.41